The more things change, the more they stay the same…
Posted by MiseryXchord on Wednesday, October 13th, 2010
It’s been 13 years since The Body Shop introduced us to Ruby, and I wonder if we’ve really progressed in that time. The fashion industry still pushes impossibly thin models as the ideal and clothing manufacturers still can’t manage to make a pair of jeans to accommodate any of us that actually have hips.
Would Ruby undergo the same challenges thrown at her by Mattel and other entities concerned that people would find viewing her offensive or bad for (their) business (unclothed or otherwise?) Fat jokes and rejection seem as prevalent as ever and the Internet is rife with insults referring to everyone who isn’t a size 5 or less as overeaters who are too lazy to get off their ass and go to the gym, as if a woman being a healthy size 14 constitutes being morbidly obese.
Women don’t look like Barbie. Most women probably don’t look like Ruby (whose measurements were devised for visual emphasis). The point is that women come in a range of shapes and sizes, but only one shape and size is held up as the ideal, and everyone else is flawed and needs to be fixed. We need more companies with forward thinking to sell their products based on enhancing what you have, rather than telling women they need to change or conceal it.
From Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop…
“In 1998, The Body Shop debuted its self-esteem campaign, featuring the generously proportioned doll we dubbed “Ruby.” Her rubenesque figure graced windows in The Body Shop windows in the UK that year, along with our slogan, “There are 3 billion women who don’t look like supermodels and only 8 who do.” She went on to appear in stores in Australia, Asia, and the United States, where she captured the imaginations of consumers weary of the rail-thin heroin-chic of the beauty industry’s advertising messages.
Ruby was a fun idea, but she carried a serious message. She was intended to challenge stereotypes of beauty and counter the pervasive influence of the cosmetics industry, of which we understood we were a part. Perhaps more than we had even hoped, Ruby kick-started a worldwide debate about body image and self-esteem.
But Ruby was not universally loved. In the United States, the toy company Mattel sent us a cease-and-desist order, demanding we pull the images of Ruby from American shop windows. Their reason: Ruby was making Barbie look bad, presumably by mocking the plastic twig-like bestseller (Barbie dolls sell at a rate of two per second; it’s hard to see how our Ruby could have done any meaningful damage.) I was ecstatic that Mattel thought Ruby was insulting to Barbie — the idea of one inanimate piece of molded plastic hurting another’s feelings was absolutely mind-blowing.
Then, in Hong Kong, posters of Ruby were banned on the Mass Transit Railway because authorities said she would offend passengers. (Granted, Ruby often appeared without clothes on, but like Barbie, she had no nipples or pubic hair.) Of course, the much more seriously offensive images of silicone-enhanced blondes in other ads were permitted to stay on the trains.
And there, in a nutshell, is my relationship with the beauty industry. It makes me angry, not only because it is a male-dominated industry built on creating needs that don’t exist, but because it seems to have decided that it needs to make women unhappy about their appearances. It plays on self-doubt and insecurity about image and ageing by projecting impossible ideals of youth and beauty.”
Source
http://www.anitaroddick.com/readmore.php?sid=13
More reading
http://anybody.squarespace.com/anybody_vent/2009/6/21/remembering-ruby.html
ADVERTISING ASSAULT: Women Awaken from Media Induced Slumber
http://www.johnriviello.com/bodyimage/dolls.html#ruby
http://www.piercemattiepublicrelations.com/beautydivision/2006/10/the_body_shop_antibarbie_doll.html
Related posts:
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 13th, 2010 at 8:08 PM. It is filed under Blog, Commentary, Fashion, MiseryXchord and tagged with fashion, self esteem, The Body Shop.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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The more things change, the more they stay the same…
Posted by MiseryXchord on Wednesday, October 13th, 2010
It’s been 13 years since The Body Shop introduced us to Ruby, and I wonder if we’ve really progressed in that time. The fashion industry still pushes impossibly thin models as the ideal and clothing manufacturers still can’t manage to make a pair of jeans to accommodate any of us that actually have hips.
Would Ruby undergo the same challenges thrown at her by Mattel and other entities concerned that people would find viewing her offensive or bad for (their) business (unclothed or otherwise?) Fat jokes and rejection seem as prevalent as ever and the Internet is rife with insults referring to everyone who isn’t a size 5 or less as overeaters who are too lazy to get off their ass and go to the gym, as if a woman being a healthy size 14 constitutes being morbidly obese.
Women don’t look like Barbie. Most women probably don’t look like Ruby (whose measurements were devised for visual emphasis). The point is that women come in a range of shapes and sizes, but only one shape and size is held up as the ideal, and everyone else is flawed and needs to be fixed. We need more companies with forward thinking to sell their products based on enhancing what you have, rather than telling women they need to change or conceal it.
From Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop…
“In 1998, The Body Shop debuted its self-esteem campaign, featuring the generously proportioned doll we dubbed “Ruby.” Her rubenesque figure graced windows in The Body Shop windows in the UK that year, along with our slogan, “There are 3 billion women who don’t look like supermodels and only 8 who do.” She went on to appear in stores in Australia, Asia, and the United States, where she captured the imaginations of consumers weary of the rail-thin heroin-chic of the beauty industry’s advertising messages.
Ruby was a fun idea, but she carried a serious message. She was intended to challenge stereotypes of beauty and counter the pervasive influence of the cosmetics industry, of which we understood we were a part. Perhaps more than we had even hoped, Ruby kick-started a worldwide debate about body image and self-esteem.
But Ruby was not universally loved. In the United States, the toy company Mattel sent us a cease-and-desist order, demanding we pull the images of Ruby from American shop windows. Their reason: Ruby was making Barbie look bad, presumably by mocking the plastic twig-like bestseller (Barbie dolls sell at a rate of two per second; it’s hard to see how our Ruby could have done any meaningful damage.) I was ecstatic that Mattel thought Ruby was insulting to Barbie — the idea of one inanimate piece of molded plastic hurting another’s feelings was absolutely mind-blowing.
Then, in Hong Kong, posters of Ruby were banned on the Mass Transit Railway because authorities said she would offend passengers. (Granted, Ruby often appeared without clothes on, but like Barbie, she had no nipples or pubic hair.) Of course, the much more seriously offensive images of silicone-enhanced blondes in other ads were permitted to stay on the trains.
And there, in a nutshell, is my relationship with the beauty industry. It makes me angry, not only because it is a male-dominated industry built on creating needs that don’t exist, but because it seems to have decided that it needs to make women unhappy about their appearances. It plays on self-doubt and insecurity about image and ageing by projecting impossible ideals of youth and beauty.”
Source
http://www.anitaroddick.com/readmore.php?sid=13
More reading
http://anybody.squarespace.com/anybody_vent/2009/6/21/remembering-ruby.html
ADVERTISING ASSAULT: Women Awaken from Media Induced Slumber
http://www.johnriviello.com/bodyimage/dolls.html#ruby
http://www.piercemattiepublicrelations.com/beautydivision/2006/10/the_body_shop_antibarbie_doll.html
Related posts:
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 13th, 2010 at 8:08 PM. It is filed under Blog, Commentary, Fashion, MiseryXchord and tagged with fashion, self esteem, The Body Shop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.